10/13/00 11:15 a.m.
Unfortunate Son
At St. Albans, aren't they supposed to like Gore?

By NR's John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru

l Gore isn't the favorite-son candidate at his high-school alma mater, the swank St. Albans in Washington, D.C. That's according to student Brian Finn, writing for the St. Albans News, the school newspaper. Finn's article came to our attention thanks to the Educational Intelligence Agency's latest weekly email bulletin, and even though it was written last March, it's still worth reading. Here's an excerpt. The last line is a gem.

Al Gore is perhaps St. Albans' most famous graduate. That said, the common assumption is that St. Albans' students would strongly favor Al Gore in the upcoming presidential election. Surprisingly, however, that is not the case. I have found that there are few people in this school who have much enthusiasm for Al Gore. ... Shouldn't we identify with Al Gore all the more, as a person plagued with the same problems that we at St. Albans have? The answer is a short no. We are all too familiar with people like Al Gore and their competitive, ambitious demeanors. We don't want to look into Al Gore's cold, calculating eyes and have those eyes belong to us in thirty years.

The full article may be read here.

Herald of Catastrophe
A new book on Gore attacks the Democratic nominee — from the Left! Only Naderites are likely to adore Al Gore: A User's Manual, by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. But there are a few lines even conservatives can enjoy. From the first chapter:

Al Gore distills in his single person the disrepair of liberalism in America today, and almost every unalluring feature of the Democratic Party. He did not attain this distinction by accident but by sedulous study from the cradle forward. A lad, and then a man who has never spent a minute of his life in ignorance or uncertainty as to where the next meal was coming from, or how the next mortgage payment might be met, Gore was nurtured to power by parents certain of his destiny.

A bonus excerpt:

Gore is both credulous and cynical at the same time. A child sick with whooping cough conjures up for him global epidemics. A hot summer in Indiana prompts him to cry that the earth is on fire. His son's injured body in a hospital bed is projected as a metaphor for the ailments of mankind. His wife's depression is magnified into a national campaign to persuade Americans they are all depressed. Al Gore never projects optimism. The Malthusian doomsayers he studied at Vanderbilt remain his models. His favorite mode, adopted in Earth in the Balance, is as the herald of catastrophe.